prosecco cake with grapefruit curd & vanilla bean icing

Sometimes working at a bakery and also baking at home proves to be a challenge. It’s hard to separate the two environments from a creative perspective. I want to be innovative at work and produce goods that will excite customers and do joyful justice to our industry. But as an at-home creative, I don’t want to exhaust it fully there. I want to test things and try things from my own kitchen, hopefully to eventually share here or with friends. And I don’t want those to overlap, for the sake of my work’s integrity. So in some senses, it feels like my personal endeavors have been limited.

However. This was a situation in which the overlap was helpful. We had a customer ask if we did champagne cake, to which I replied we do not, because we do not. We could do it, but it has never quite been in our repertoire. At the time I’d been mulling over the grapefruit curd of my last post, as if it was already an element of a grander scheme unknown to me. After this conversation, I started to think about this cake. And the fact that we had an unopened bottle of prosecco in our refrigerator, leftover from New Years. And how good that cake would probably taste with grapefruit. And maybe vanilla bean. For a couple of weeks I thought about this cake. Eventually I started to dream about it. I researched different recipes but I never found one that really satisfied. On several occasions I declared that this would be the day I’d make that cake, but I never did.

Finally, I found a recipe that seemed… Right. From another blogger. This was it. I gathered my ingredients. I pulled my prosecco from the fridge. Turns out it was moscato. Shoot. Now what. Make it anyway, duh. I made the batter. Delicious. I baked the cake. Smelled amazing. Tasted it- even better than it smelled. Ya feel me?

This thing is awesome. It takes some time and energy and creativity, but it is so worth it. You have to taste it.

Prosecco Cake
adapted from 33 Shades of Green
3 cups AP flour
1 Tbs baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
6 egg whites
1 cup butter at room temp
2 cups sugar
1 Tbs vanilla
2 cups prosecco (or in this case, moscato)

Preheat oven to 350F; grease and line two 9” pans.

In a medium bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, and salt. In the bowl of a stand mixer, whip the egg whites until dry. Remove from bowl and set aside. Place butter and sugar in the stand mixer and beat until light. Add vanilla. Add flour mixture and prosecco alternatively in three additions, beginning and ending with flour. Remove from stand mixer and fold in egg whites with a spatula. Pour evenly into the two pans and bake about 35 minutes. Cool cake completely.

Vanilla Bean Icing
1 pound unsalted butter at room temp
3 cups powdered sugar
1/4 cup heavy cream, at room temp or warmed
1 vanilla bean, scraped

In a stand mixer, cream butter until fluffy. Gradually add powdered sugar. Add heavy cream and the seeds from the vanilla bean. Mix thoroughly. 

Grapefruit Curd- see here! 

To assemble, evenly distribute the grapefruit curd and icing atop both layers of the cake. Top as you wish and serve day-of!